The Board of Overseers of the American National Election Studies is in the
midst of planning the 1996 ANES survey, the latest in a continuous
series of biennial election studies now spanning almost fifty
years. The American National Election Studies are supported by the National
Science Foundation as a national resource in the social sciences,
and the Board welcomes the advice and participation of
the social science community in planning the 1996 Study.

Study Design

At its meeting earlier this month, the Board set the broad design
parameters and substantive themes of the 1996 ANES. The survey will
consist of a 70-minute pre-election interview and a 70-minute
post-election interview. Pre-election interviewing will begin on
September 4th and continue until the day before the election, with
a national sample of 1750 respondents divided into four quartersamples
released at biweekly intervals. Post-election interviewing
will begin the day after the election, with approximately two-thirds
of the interviews expected to be completed within three weeks and a
projected post-election sample size of 1490. We anticipate that
two-thirds of the respondents will have been interviewed in the 1994
ANES survey, and roughly half of these will also have been interviewed
in 1992. This study design will facilitate panel analysis of the
electorate's reactions to the significant political changes of the
last four years, while also allowing for detailed analysis of the
dynamics of the 1996 general election campaign. In addition, as
with all ANES surveys, much of the content of the 1996 survey will
consist of "core" items asked repeatedly over the years to provide
a basis for systematic analysis of political continuity and change
on an even longer time scale.

Substantive Themes

The major substantive themes of the 1996 ANES survey will include
evaluations of the performance of President Clinton and the Republican
Congress, the role of issues in shaping and reinforcing each party's
electoral coalition, public preferences regarding the federal budget,
taxes and spending, federalism, and the scope of government, and
the impact of the news media, advertising, and campaign events on
public perceptions and preferences. The survey will include a variety
of new questions developed and tested in the 1995 Pilot Study, most
notably detailed batteries on the environment and media exposure and
new items in the areas of budgetary trade-offs,
uncertainty, and humanitarianism.

Study Planning

Planning for the 1996 ANES survey has been underway for well over a
year, and has already benefited greatly from the participation of
numerous colleagues from the ANES research community who wrote to
suggest specific items or substantive themes, participated in
ANES-sponsored conferences on The Impact of Campaigns (November 1994),
Candidate Evaluation (December 1994), and Values and Predispositions
February 1995), or contributed to the development and testing of new
instrumentation in the 1995 Pilot Study.

The next major step in the planning process will be the meeting on
March 29th and 30th of the 1996 ANES Planning Committee. Members of
the committee are: Michael Alvarez, Larry Bartels(Chair), Charles
Franklin, Donald Kinder, Jonathon Krosnick, Warren Miller, Wendy Rahn,
George Rabinowitz, Steven Rosenstone, Virginia Sapiro, Laura Stoker
and John Zaller. The Committee will produce detailed recommendations
regarding the content of the pre- and post-election surveys that
the Board of Overseers will review on May 17th and 18th.

CORE

Proposed Core Content for 1996 Election Study is a list of
items and concepts that the ANES Board of Overseers has designated as
presidential Core. These questions are the ones that the Board regards
as necessary for understanding any given presidential election as well
as for making comparisons across elections over time. These Core items
will be asked in the 1996 Pre- /Post-Election Study and in subsequent
presidential election year studies into the future. Other questions,
of course, will also appear in the 1996 ANES. They will include questions
developed in the 1995 Pilot Study as well as questions that are
designed to tap the issues and themes that arise during the election
campaign. (A special subgroup of the Planning Committee will be
charged with monitoring these developments and identifying appropriate
questions for the survey.)

This document is available via the World Wide Web
(http://www.electionstudies.org) under the link to the 1996 American National Election
Study on the homepage, on the ANES ftp server
as a MS Excel and text file in the directory, or by
contacting ANES Project Staff (email: anes@electionstudies.org and phone:
(734) 764-5494)

Each row of the core document corresponds to an ANES question;
the columns indicate the presidential election years in which the
question has been asked. In the interests of brevity, we have not
attempted to reproduce the verbatim question wording, but rather
have used a phrase or short sentence to capture the question essence.
Each item is assigned an ID#. In reviewing this document, note that
the Board has proposed to ask some items of a random half of the
respondents. These items are indicated by "YES" in the column headed
HALF SAMPLE. In some instances, the Board has decided that the concept
is Core, but the exact measurement is not. These concepts are italicized.
For example, candidate traits are Core, but the Board has not yet
decided which traits will be asked (Item # 1040.1).

Advise the Board and Planning Committee

As is our custom, the Board circulates the draft core document to
the ANES research community and solicits reactions and suggestions
to the proposal. Thus, if you disagree with the Board's recommendations
about Core -- in particular, if you do not find listed as Core an item
asked in previous Presidential Election Studies that is crucial to
your research -- please send us a brief memo in which you make a case
for the questions inclusion in the 1996 Study.

The Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in
Chicago will include a public forum on the 1996 American National Election Study
on Friday, April 19th, from 8:30 to 10:15 a.m. The forum will provide
another opportunity for members of the ANES research community to offer
comments and advice regarding the scope and content of the 1996 Election
Study. We hope you will attend.

The Board also welcomes written comments and advice addressing specific
survey items, topical priorities, or broad study themes. In order
to be efficacious, your advice and comments should reach the ANES staff
in Ann Arbor by email, fax, or mail no later than May 7th (to be
considered by the full Board) and preferably by March 19th (to be
considered by the Planning Committee). We look forward to hearing from you.

An Update on the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems

ANES has joined social scientists from over fifty consolidated and
emerging democracies to take part in the Comparative Study of Electoral
Systems -- the most extensive program of cross-national electoral
research ever undertaken. This international collaboration strives to
advance the understanding of enduring and fundamental debates about
electoral choice in ways not possible through the secondary analysis of
existing data. The goals of this unique program of research are
threefold: illuminate how electoral institutions constrain the
beliefs and behaviors of citizens to condition the nature and quality
of democratic choice as expressed through popular elections; understand
the nature of political and social cleavages and alignments; and shed
light on how citizens, living under diverse political arrangements,
evaluate democratic institutions and processes.

Beginning in 1996, collaborators will field studies around national
elections as they occur. Each national election study will include
the CSES questionnaire module and questions designed to measure
background characteristics of the respondents. (Thus, ANES will carry
the CSES questionnaire module on its Post-Election Study.)
Collaborators will code all these data to prescribed international
standards and will deposit them in a central archive soon after the
election. Simultaneously, teams of researchers will also collect
institutional and political data for each country. All the micro-
and macro-level data from each polity will be merged into a single,
cross-national data set that will be freely distributed.

Social scientists from around the world have collaborated to specify
the research agenda, the study design, and the micro- and macro-level
data that indigenous teams of researchers will collect within each
polity. This past summer and fall, the CSES questionnaire module
underwent rigorous pilot testing in seven distinct political settings
including the U.S. In December, forty colleagues from twenty-nine
polities attended the CSES Planning Conference in Budapest to
review the pilot study results and to finalize the questionnaire
module, the background variables to be coded, and the macro-level
data to be collected.

Copies of the questionnaire module, the Final Report of the Planning
Committee, and other study materials are available on the CSES Website
http://www.cses.org or from the ANES Project Staff.

The ANES Director of Studies

Santa Traugott, ANES Director of Studies since 1984, will retire from
the ANES Staff this December. The ANES Board, Principal Investigators,
Project Staff, and research community will suffer a great loss with
Santa's retirement. Santa has shepherded ANES through eleven national
data collections and six Pilot Studies. Under Santa's direction, ANES
created the Cumulative Data File. We will all deeply miss Santa's savvy;
her technical skills and wisdom as a survey researcher; her substantive
understanding of ANES, her appreciation of ANES mission and history;
and her dedication to the project.

As the result of an extensive national search, we are pleased to
announce that Dr. M. Kathryn Cirksena will be joining the ANES Project
Staff on May 16, 1996 as the Director of Studies. Kathy brings to ANES
impressive skills both as a social scientist and as a survey researcher.
Between 1980 and 1982 Kathy served as Research Coordinator at the
University of Kentucky Survey Research Center. She helped create the
Indiana University Survey Research Center where she served as its
Co-Director until 1984. Between 1986 and 1988, Kathy was a Study Director
and then Director of Computer Assisted Surveys at the University of
California, Berkeley Survey Research Center. Kathy received her Ph.D.
in Communications from Stanford University in 1991, was a Fulbright
Lecturer at the University of Timisoara in Romania between 1991 and 1992
and is currently an Assistant Professor, as well as the Director of the
Communications Program, at Russell Sage College.

ANES Pilot Study and Technical Reports

The ANES World Wide Website continues to grow, with the recent addition
of abstracts for all seventy-six of the ANES Pilot Study Reports (1979-1993)
and all forty-eight of the ANES Technical Reports. The reports can be
searched by author and by keyword. The most recent reports will be made
available (full-text) on-line: the 1993 Pilot Study Reports are currently
available; the 1995 Pilot Study Reports will be available online soon.
ANES Website: http://www.electionstudies.org

ANES Data Online

Our joint project with the Inter-university Consortium for Political
and Social Research (ICPSR) to get data and documentation online
is proceeding. The 1992 American National Election Study is available for
researchers to run online descriptive statistics and to subset data
for delivery across the internet to the user's desktop. The codebook,
including all introductory materials as well as the appendices, is also
available for searching and browsing. The 1994 ANES data set will be
online soon, and the 1952-1994 Cumulative Data File will be available
shortly thereafter.

The ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior

To replace the American National Election Studies Data Sourcebook,
1952-1986, the ANES Project Staff is creating a new resource for the
research community: the ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior.
The Guide will list marginal distributions for many of the most widely used
variables, will break down those variables by critical demographic and
political characteristics, and will provide graphs for many over time trends.
These data will be available free to the research community via the
ANES Website. The Guide will be an invaluable resource for tracing
the ebb and flow of public opinion, electoral behavior, social and
political cleavages, and political alignments over the last five decades.
In addition, by providing the relevant variable numbers from the
Cumulative Data File in each table, the Guide will facilitate more
indepth analysis by interested researchers. We expect the Guide to
be available by late Spring. Keep an eye
on "http://www.electionstudies.org/announce/announce.htm" for updates.

The ANES Cumulative Data File

The ANES Project Staff is also currently working on an expanded
edition of the ANES Cumulative Data File, 1952-1994. In September
1995 we released an updated Cumulative File which incorporated
respondents to the 1994 Election Study. Since then, the Staff has
been working on a major revision to the File that will add approximately
300 new variables. We also anticipate streamlining the accompanying
documentation to make it more user friendly. Again, keep an eye
on http://www.electionstudies.org/announce/announce.htm for updates on this release.

Are You Included in the ANES Bibliography?

We are in the process of updating the ANES Bibliography of Data Use
and we want to make sure that everyone who has made use of ANES data
is listed in the next edition. If your work using ANES data is not
included in the Bibliography, please let us know. You can check the
Bibliography by looking at the ANES Website
(http://www.electionstudies.org/resources/papers/reference_library.htm); the ANES ftp
server, or the ANES CD-ROM.
We would also be glad to receive a copy of your paper, as well as the
citation for entry into the Bibliography. Send us the citation by mail
(ANES Bibliography, c/o CPS/ISR, P.O. Box 1248, Ann Arbor, MI
48106-1248) or drop us an email at anes@electionstudies.org.